"Devil-may-care" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the end," they warn you, "no matter what you play." And the business man, who should know better, too often enters the share market as if he were sitting in an open poker party, among sharpers and pickpockets, and recklessly surrenders himself to every temptation of this devil-may-care atmosphere, while he "plays ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... Cullum's disastrous practical joke had become on a sudden case-hardened, as it were. The consumptive pallor had miraculously disappeared from his cheeks and the homesick look from his eyes. He bore the merciless chaffing at Bishop's with devil-may-care good-nature, and he besought Mrs. Cullum, almost with tears in his eyes, to "let up on ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... girl thrill. What then the actual thing, the uniform, invested somehow with chivalry and courage, the clean-cut athletic young man, somber and fascinating with his intent eyes, his serious brow, or his devil-may-care gallantry, the compelling presence of him that breathes of his sacrifice, of his near departure to privation, to squalid, comfortless trenches, to the fire and hell of war, to blood and agony and death—in a word to fight, fight, fight for women!... ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the porch sewing. She rose in surprise when her cousin and the sheepman appeared. They came with jingling spurs across the plaza toward her. Bob was red as a turkeycock, but Fendrick wore his most devil-may-care insouciance. ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... wonder—you don't know what it is to run a 'Geebung Advocate' or 'Mudgee Budgee Chronicle', and live there. He was about the same build as the Lachlan, but stouter, and had something the same kind of eyes; but he was ordinarily as careless and devil-may-care as the ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... indescribable bitterness, a desperate cynicism that urged him to strike out, careless of friend or foe. Who could say what would happen to him when he left here? A flash of spring madness, then to go forth devil-may-care. ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... it is not a pleasant experience it has some charms and many uses. It wakes a man up, shows him the real world again, and makes him know his own value once more. So I started for New York in rather a devil-may-care spirit, without the slightest chance of doing the business in comfort. And my misfortunes began ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... delightful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world. Bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyme is a vagabond and a spy, who only covers the shame of his nakedness with these rags of devil-may-care good spirits. The genial cynicism of Ogniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist of moral illusions, the unmasker of self-deception, who with long experience of human infirmities, has ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... honour to paint my portrait beside his own, where you may see both of them to-day in that glorious fresco of the School of Athens, the serious inspired face of the young maestro cheek by cheek with the coarser features of his laughing, devil-may-care friend; and I prize more highly that testimony of his esteem than all the other honours ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... the first we had seen in a long time, were brought in from Sherman's army. They were plump, well-conditioned, well-dressed, healthy, devil-may-care young fellows, whose confidence in themselves and in Sherman was simply limitless, and their contempt for all Rebels and especially those who terrorized ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... beneath the devil-may-care rake of the buckled hat, was pale and handsome, and, despite its studied air of gentlemanly weariness, the eyes were singularly quick and young, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... unknown and bidding a not unfriendly good-bye at the shore. The temper of adventure is deeply ingrained in the new romance as in the old; the very word adventure is saturated with a sentiment very congenial to us both for better and worse; it quickens the hero in us and flatters the devil-may-care. ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... devil-may-care way does not trouble to persecute or oppress; his tolerant spirit, aided by the splendid devotion of a few great men, has, in the words of Seeley, built up a glorious free Empire "in a fit of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... forward, observing that the man on the bed had his hands bound. Bending down, he recognized the face of Gordon. Beaten and bruised and gaunt from hunger it was, but the eyes still gleamed with the same devil-may-care smile. ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... might have in store for him. Sometimes, when neighbors or customers "treated" him in the village, and he felt he had taken all the whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent cigar instead of a drink. He did not particularly like the smoking of it, but there was a certain devil-may-care recklessness in going down the street with a lighted cigar in his teeth, which had all the more fascination for him because of its manifest danger. He felt at these times that he was going the pace, and ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... the lowering wintry morn, And the mist on the Cotswold hills, Where I once heard the blast of the huntsman's horn, Not far from the seven rills. Jack Esdale was there, and Hugh St. Clair, Bob Chapman and Andrew Kerr, And big George Griffiths on Devil-May-Care, And—black Tom Oliver. And one who rode on a dark-brown steed, Clean jointed, sinewy, spare, With the lean game head of the Blacklock breed, And the resolute eye that loves the lead, And the quarters massive and square— A ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the stone floor at every step, and the great spots of mud—some of them not yet dry—with which he was bespattered from head to foot, showed that he must have been riding far and fast. He was a fierce-looking fellow, with an insolent, devil-may-care, arrogant sort of expression, and bold, swaggering gait, yet he started at sight of the young baron, and plainly shrunk from his eye; hastening on to the fire and bending over it, with his back turned to de Sigognac, under pretence ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... the crudest thing you could do would be to forgive me! I couldn't bear it. I flirted with Mr. Congdon; not only that but I took advantage of his distress over his father's efforts to estrange you two to counsel him to lead a reckless, devil-may-care existence. And I tried the same thing on Mr. Bennett, only he was much more susceptible than your husband and took me more seriously. I want you, one and all, to be sure that I ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... one evidently getting his name from his brick-red hair. They were the roistering type, hard drinkers, devil-may-care fellows, packing guns and wearing bold fronts—a kind that the Rangers always ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... I asked for something harder in tone than the usual fluty, mellifluous sound in order to depict the hearty laugh of the peasants in the first chorus. They were almost scandalized when I asked for a somewhat raucous, devil-may-care carousal, tone in the "Auerbach's Wine-cellar" scene, and when a fiendish, snarling utterance was called for in the "Pandemonium" scene they thought I was mad. However, the performance settled all these objections. ...
— Essentials in Conducting • Karl Wilson Gehrkens
... came back to her was a relief in more ways than one, although she was half provoked at the insouciant, devil-may-care-now ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... mantel-shelf, who were represented as in one eternal state of weariness from the waist upwards; and hummed a fragment of a song. It was a Bacchanalian song, something about a Sparkling Bowl. He sang it with an assumption of a Devil-may-care voice, that made his face a thousand times more meagre and more ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... centre of all Bohemian licence. Mr. TITTERTON has the DU MAURIER manner, but his jocular skittishness, aided by asterisks, exclamation marks and suspensive dots, has curiously little behind it. It is not enough to-day to paint the gay impropriety of models and the devil-may-care penury of lighthearted artists. Trilby began the movement, Louise ended it, and Mr. TITTERTON is behind his day. I am glad, however, to learn that he was so splendid a model. The students at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 147, August 12, 1914 • Various
... the stars, the wandering of the moon, the coming and going of the sun, the crooning of the river, the shout of the big, manly, devil-may-care winds, the boom of the diving beaver in ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Lucky grinned, an impish, devil-may-care grin that lightened up his freckled face and bunched the tiny wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. Then with characteristic abruptness ...
— Larson's Luck • Gerald Vance
... wine-glasses, and some dry biscuits of a truly early Victorian dryness. This ghostly hospitality was duly dispensed, and Luccia, who seldom drinks anything but tea, instead of sipping her sherry with a lady-like aloofness, drained her glass with a sudden devil-may-care abandon, and, to the evident amazement even of the furniture, held it out to be refilled. Such pagan behaviour had never disgraced that scandalized drawing-room before. And when to her action she added ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... one day that the hangman was to give the rope to five fellows, the most popular and devil-may-care rakes and roysterers in the whole town. Beppo was up very early that morning, and at the first streak of light had dropped himself over the wall into the town ditch, and was away for the open country and the free air of the hills; for he knew that neither at home nor in the streets would ...
— The Blue Moon • Laurence Housman
... twenty miles to the ranch in a canvas-topped buggy, drawn by a pair of devil-may-care little nags, who took us across dry arroyos and the rocky beds of running streams in a style that promised to make sticks of the vehicle. It held good, however, and rattled out a sort of derisive snicker at every ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... screaming of women. Everybody began calling on Heaven, and wailing and remembering their dear ones. Amarantus alone was cheerful, thinking he was on the point of ruling out his creditors." Amarantus was the captain, who wished to die, because he was deep in debt. What with the devil-may-care captain, the Maccabean steersman, and the critical onlooker, who was a devoted admirer of Hypatia, rarely has wayfaring been conducted under more delightful conditions. As is often the case in life, the humors of the ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... his pit for the first, Israel had been struck by the dismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders. But hardly had he himself been a moulder three days, when his previous sedateness of concern at his unfortunate lot, began to conform to the reckless sort of half jolly despair expressed by the others. The truth indeed was, that this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... characters of various depths of shade, according to their company, nicknamed "Bower o' Bliss" and "Freckles"; some horsey men "in the know" of betting circles; a travelling actor from the theatre, and two devil-may-care young men who proved to be gownless undergraduates; they had slipped in by stealth to meet a man about bull-pups, and stayed to drink and smoke short pipes with the racing gents aforesaid, looking at their watches ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... Rollicking, devil-may-care, the whaling song went on through long verses. Many of the words she could not distinguish, but throughout the singing she was aware of a feeling that these singers were men who had cast aside the restraint of conventions, even ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... recline"), an anacreontic quite unsurpassable in its own kind. We need dwell but briefly on such pieces as "Believe me if all those endearing young Charms," which is typical of much that Moore wrote, but does not reach the true devil-may-care note of Suckling, or as "By the Hope within us springing," for Moore's war-like pieces are seldom or never good. But with "Love's Young Dream" we come back to the style of which it is impossible to say less than that it is quite ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... at all clear, he was confessing to himself; in spite of his assumed indifference, he was embarrassed by the focused stares of Dow and Mac Tavish. He wondered what sudden, devil-may-care whimsy was this that was galloping him away from business and politics and every other sane subject! He was conscious that there was in him a freakish and juvenile ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... Buyukdere. He sees them all go by, from the gay French secretary of embassy, puffing at a cigarette as he hurries from one visit to the next, to the neat and military German diplomat, landing from his steam launch on his return from the palace; from the devil-may-care English youth in white flannel to the graceful Turkish adjutant on his beautiful Arab horse; from the dark-eyed Armenian lady, walking slowly by the water's edge, to the terrifically arrayed little Greek dandy, with a spotted waistcoat and a ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... years, but was in my hopelessly corrupted thirties before ever I saw a copy. Even then, it did not lack interest. And one passage, at least, richly rewarded a glance through its pages. It seems that Elsie, arriving from somewhere, reached some city in the late evening. Her father (a rakish, devil-may-care fellow who thought it was all right for Elsie to play the piano on Sunday) met her at the station and engaged a cabriolet to take her across town to whatever shelter had been selected for the night. As they were bowling along one of the principal ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... that is quite hopeless, but I will certainly tell you all I know about him. I saw him, of course, many times in the village. He was a tall thin man with what I might call a devil-may-care, and at the same time a mournful expression. I have no doubt that had his death not been so sudden he would have told you something about himself. I have his effects tied up in a bundle. I examined them at the time, but there was nothing of any value in them except a signet-ring. ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... readers have laughed as heartily as their own fellow countrymen. The Experiences of an Irish R.M.remains, perhaps, their best book. The work of these ladies, be it said by the way, is in the line of descent from that group of older Irish novelists who wrote in the spirit of the devil-may-care gentry, the novelists from Maxwell to Lover and Lever, who were ever questing "divilment and divarshion," and who in their moods of boisterous fun forgot the real Irishman, and presented in his place a caricature—him of the Celtic screech and the exhilarating whack of the shillelagh, ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... theatre, which can only expect to prosper, in a pecuniary sense, by pandering to the tastes of the people, continually recurs to the annals of thieves and banditti for its most favourite heroes. These theatrical robbers; with their picturesque attire, wild haunts, jolly, reckless, devil-may-care manners, take a wonderful hold upon the imagination, and, whatever their advocates may say to the contrary, exercise a very pernicious influence upon public morals. In the Memoirs of the Duke of Guise upon the Revolution of Naples in 1647 and 1648, it ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... himself. He felt within him that burning sensation that always seized upon him when his self-love as a dashing devil-may-care fellow was wounded, especially when the offender was of ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... her? He's told me nothing; but I'll warrant I could paint her portrait. She's a fine figure of a young Englishwoman, brown-haired, grey-eyed, and she stands about five-feet-eight in her shoes. There's an expression of great malice and humour in her physiognomy, and a kind of devil-may-care haughtiness in the poise of her head. She's a bit of a grande dame, into the bargain—something like an Anglo-Italian duchess, for example; she's monstrously rich; and she adds, you'll be surprised to learn, to her other fascinations that of being ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... laughing as she clung to her escort on the opposite side of the road, by the gardens. Across at the Cafe de Paris the people were going in to supper. The spirit of enjoyment seemed to be in the air—the light-hearted, fascinating, devil-may-care atmosphere she knew so well. Violet looked back into the bedroom and she no longer had the impulse to sleep. Her face had hardened a little. Every one was so happy and she was so lonely. She stuffed the notes and ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... country in the world could produce such a slangy, jollying, devil-may-care host as these vociferous American soldiers. How he longed to be ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... have it—as some folks say, although others put it down to something more than luck—Mr Stanchion wasn't like one of those jolly, devil-may-care, slap-dash sort of officers, that your regular shell-backs like best. He was a silent, quiet, reflective man, who looked and spoke as if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth; and yet he thought deeper and further than ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... village was a rough place. No mining hamlet in the placer gulches of California, nor any backwoods village I ever saw, approached it in picturesque, devil-may-care abandon. It was a lawless draggle of wooden huts and houses, built in crooked lines, wrangling around the boggy shore of the island for a mile or so in the general form of the letter S, without the slightest subordination to ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... mustache only, and this—oh! inconsistency of great minds—he laboriously twirled heavenwards in the French fashion. It was, in fact, the guileless Alphonse's chief tribulation that, however industriously he cultivated that devil-may-care upward sweep, the sparse ornament to his upper lip invariably drooped downwards again before long. In the sunny land of France it is held that the mustache worn "en croc" not only confers upon its possessor an air of distinction, but renders that ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... that some of them seemed familiar, and almost jocular, with the croupiers; and that, although they did not talk loud, being kept in order by the general etiquette, they rustled and fidgeted and played in a devil-may-care sort of manner. This was in great measure accounted for by the circumstance that they were losing other people's money: at all events, they often turned their heads over their shoulders, and applied for fresh funds to their ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... flush of pink in her cheeks, the features and outline of an old Grecian goddess, but with more of Juno than of Venus, for she might perhaps err a little upon the side of opulence. There was a challenge and defiance dancing in those dark devil-may-care eyes of hers which might have roused a more cold-blooded man than her companion. Her dress was simple and dark, but admirably cut. She was clever enough to know that a pretty woman should concentrate attention upon herself, and a plain one divert it ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... of squeaky French followed, a word or two of Italian. The waiters parted and this American stepped out. I had expected to see him taller, but his power was in the weight of his shoulders, the easy swing of his drunken progress down the aisle. The devil-may-care was in him—in his handsome, laughing, wild eyes—the look of a child mad with the promise of a world ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... another—three Chucksterfields from Chucksterfield House; the children are crying out for an absent Cadgerboy; the woman at the street corner is weeping for her Coffintop, and will not be comforted. We settle down with a rollicking ease into our seats (for we are a bold, devil-may-care race, the C's of Battersea), and an oath is administered to us in a totally inaudible manner by an individual resembling an Army surgeon in his second childhood. We understand, however, that we are to well and truly try the ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... down the hill with a devil-may-care mien, her gun still over her shoulder, her hands in ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... Rohutu noa-noa in the reva or clouds above the mountain of Temehani unauna, in the island of Raiatea. The ordinary people could seldom afford the fees demanded by the priest, and had to be satisfied with a denial of this Mussulman Eden reserved for the festive and devil-may-care Arioi, as ordinary people perforce abstain from intoxicants in America while the rich drink their fill. The ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the charming blunders of the past have been set to rights. Highways are no longer the casual folderols of adventure, but the reposeful and efficient arteries of traffic. The roofs of the town are no longer a rumble of idiotic hats cocked at a devil-may-care angle. Windows no longer wink lopsidedly at one another. Doorways and chimneys, railings and lanterns have changed. Cobblestones and dirt have vanished, at ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... dissipated by this incident, Lanyard followed his natural enemy into the dining-room with an air as devil-may-care as one could wish and so impressive that the maitre-d'hotel abandoned the detective to the mercies of one of his captains and himself hastened to seat Lanyard and take ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... copied from a remote period are always attractive, and Mr. Ryde did all he knew in this line, giving even to the ordinary Sir Peter of our old-fashioned knowledge certain garments in vogue quite a century before he could possibly have been born. This gave a charming wildness to his character, a devil-may-care sort of an air, that exactly suited his gay and festive mood. After all, why should Sir Peter be ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... of our war. This was Lieutenant Colonel St. Leger Greenfell, of the English service, and of all the very remarkable characters who have figured (outside of popular novels) in this age, he will receive the suffrages of our Western cavalrymen, for pre-eminence in devil-may-care eccentricity. He had commenced life (I believe) by running away from his father, because the latter would not permit him to enter the army, and in doing so, he showed the good sense that he really possessed, for the army was the proper place for him—provided they went to war ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... had its admiral and vice-admiral, appointed partly by the owner, and partly by the skippers of the vessels. The devil-may-care spirit was always a great factor with the men. The admiral directed operations by flags in the daytime and by rockets at night, thus indicating what the fleet was to do and where they were to fish. Generally he had the fastest boat, and the cutters, hunting for the fleet always lay just astern ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... a heartbreaking attempt at devil-may-care cheerfulness] I ain't miserable. [He sits down again, and stretches his legs in an attempt to ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... no sympathy where they knew none was needed. To the discerning, though they had never known another man who won or lost with equal gusto in the game, who when he met fortune or misfortune "treated those two impostors just the same," Jim Kendric was exactly what he appeared to be, a devil-may-care sort of fellow who had infinite faith in his tomorrow and who had never ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... young resentment she laughed at the way in which he drawled this out, and with a swift sweep her boyish eyes took in again his compelling devil-may-care charm. She was a tenderfoot, but intuition as well as experience taught her that he was unusual enough to be one of ten thousand. No young Greek god's head could have risen more superbly above the brick-tanned column of the neck than this close-cropped ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... others. In deference to Mr. Censor, names of places and persons have been suppressed, but such omissions will not detract from the interest of the book. 'Over the Top with the Third Australian Division' is illustrative of that big-hearted, devil-may-care style of the Australians, the men who can see the brighter side of life under the most distracting circumstances and most unpromising conditions. In the pages that follow, some incidents of the life of the men may help to pass away a pleasant ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... no sane man's conscience; but being warned by the priest, that such arguments bordered on heresy, he shifted his ground, and maintained that Tchitchikof was much too young and too far from death to dream of penitence, even if he had committed such a crime; though he was evidently too reckless and devil-may-care to leave any dash of the miser in his composition. But the inspector of highways effectually knocked the clerical argument on the head, by saying, that had any priest thought it necessary, for the good of Tchitchikof's soul, that he should part ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... his wont, began running things his own way. It had been found useless to question the soldiers of the guard. Not a man could be found to admit he knew the faintest thing about the escape. As for the prisoners, most of them reckless, devil-may-care rascals, they grinned or leered suggestively, ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... certain different types of humanity to eat or drink in each other's presence. In brief, there was obviously only one dining-room, and not a series of dining-rooms classified according to castes. Mr. Prohack, free, devil-may-care and original, said to ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... off to the mines, of course, as soon as I could get there, and I made piles of money, especially at first. And I was probably the most hot-headed, reckless, devil-may-care young rascal on the whole Coast. I made many enemies and had many a narrow escape, as most everybody ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... analogy. To the facts then. You deny that a youth of one character can be transformed into a man of an opposite character. Now then—yes, I have it. There's the founder of La Trappe, and Ignatius Loyola; in boyhood, and someway into manhood, both devil-may-care bloods, and yet, in the end, the wonders of the world for anchoritish self-command. These two examples, by-the-way, we cite to such patrons as would hastily return rakish young waiters upon us. 'Madam, or ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... Governor's footmen had set out green tables for whist. Their features were full and plump, some of them had beards, and in no case was their hair curled or waved or arranged in what the French call "the devil-may-care" style. On the contrary, their heads were either close-cropped or brushed very smooth, and their faces were round and firm. This category represented the more respectable officials of the town. In passing, I may say that in business matters fat men always prove superior ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... becoming "alike." We secretly admired their perfect and unalterable observance of all orders even though we were, at the same time, scheming to evade a lot of those same restrictions which appeared to us to be unnecessary. They, on their part, could not help admitting that the dash and "devil-may-care" spirit shown by our men often accomplished results not otherwise attainable but from the emulation of which they were barred by "traditions." The discipline of the one and the discipline of the other ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... told me that she had almost broken his old heart lately by fallin' in love, or imaginin' she had, with one of his herdsmen, a handsome, dashing, devil-may-care sort of a fellow he had picked up at Bozeman and taken out to his ranch about a year before. When the old man found out that the gal was gone on the fellow, and that he was a-meetin' her after dark, he ups and discharges him instanter, and gives him a piece of his ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... touches the deepest springs of human conduct. There were two men in Priam Farll. One was the shy man, who had long ago persuaded himself that he actually preferred not to mix with his kind, and had made a virtue of his cowardice. The other was a doggish, devil-may-care fellow who loved dashing adventures and had a perfect passion for free intercourse with the entire human race. No. 2 would often lead No. 1 unsuspectingly forward to a difficult situation from which No. 1, though angry and ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... assisted in dressing him for this occasion, like the manager of a theatre who is uneasy about the debut of his principal actor; he feared lest the vulgar habits of this devil-may-care life should crop up to the surface of the newly-fledged banker. "Talk as little as you can," he said to him. "No banker ever gabbles; he acts, thinks, reflects, listens, weighs. To seem like a banker you must say nothing, or, at any rate, mere nothings. Check that ribald ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... ugly, devil-may-care set of fellows they were! Their uniforms set off their figures to advantage. Their faces showed they were eager for the fight. Their bayonets were fixed, for they had been ordered to take the works by a bayonet charge. When they got through the trees, ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan |
